By default, your community gets a “subdomain.mobilize.io” domain by default, you can customize only the subdomain portion of the domain. If you’d like to use your own domain and fully brand the experience, this help article is for you.

In summary, this article covers the following:

1. Prerequisites
2. Choose your custom domain
3. Connect the CNAME Records

Step 1: Prerequisites

You’ll also need to make sure that you have the following:

1. Access to the Account Owner - To access the domain settings, you’ll need access to the account owner as this is the only user who is allowed to do the setup
2. Access to your DNS provider - where you bought your domain name (eg. GoDaddy, Route53, Gandi, or any other)
3. Enterprise or Premium plan - This feature can be enabled for Enterprise and Premium customers

Step 2: Choose your custom domain

Decide what would be your custom domain. Let’s say that you own “exampledomain.com”. 

You’ll have two options:

• Map a subdomain of your custom domain to Mobilize. For example: “community.mybrand.com”, "www.exampledomain.com", or any other subdomain you’d like to have. Using a dedicated subdomain like community.mybrand.com is the most common implementation of this feature.
• Map the top domain “exampledomain.com” to Mobilize. This is not always possible and mainly depends on your DNS provider (GoDaddy, for example, won’t let you map the top domain. Choosing www.exampledomain.com might be your best option in this case).

*Note:
We do not recommend using groups.exampledomain.com or members.exampledomain.com if you are planning on using the custom email domain feature. Using the groups or members' domain prefix will cause email deliverability issues.
We also do not recommend using a domain without a domain suffix (.com).

Step 3: Connect your CNAME

Let’s assume that exampledomain.com is your regular domain and you want your Mobilize community address to change from “exampledomain.mobilize.io” to “community.exampledomain.com” 

In Mobilize

1.  Head to your Community Settings and click on Edit your Domain
2. Enter your registered domain and add the prefix you decided on above in Step 1
3. Once you click next you will be presented you the DNS configuration for your custom domain (shown above). DO NOT CLICK ACTIVATE YET AND KEEP THIS TAB OPEN

In your DNS Provider

1. Head to your DNS settings to add a CNAME record
2. Create a CNAME record using NAME as the VALUE and the ALIAS FOR as the RECORD
3. Click Save

Once these have been completed, head back to Mobilize and then click Activate

IMPORTANT NOTE: If removing the vanity URL, the domain in Mobilize needs to be cleared first and then removed from your DNS. If not, issues may occur. 

Steps for the Account Owner to do this: 
1. Click the Community Menu (three people) icon in the upper right and choose Community Settings
2. Under General, choose Connect your domain
3. Click the Clear link next to the custom domain and then click the Confirm button